Weekend on television: Flood (ITV1, Sun) - Peep Show (C4, Fri)

By James Walton

12:01AM BST 05 May 2008

By James Walton

IV1’s Flood (Sun) didn’t waste much time. Within seconds, a group of boffins had peered at a machine monitoring the size of North Sea waves and gasped, “What? It’s got to be a mistake!” We then cut to Wick in Scotland where an old granny twinkled loveably for a few moments before being swept away by a wall of water. Next came reports that the same storm-surge had flattened Arbroath.

But of course this was never going to be a proper disaster movie until the storm headed for London – which it soon did. Waiting there were a cast of characters whose eerie familiarity suggested that the programme’s desire to ape the disaster movies of the past went much deeper than merely portraying total catastrophe.

Robert Carlyle, for instance, played Rob, the strangely driven marine engineer who’d later be transformed into an action hero. In the meantime, he was called to the Thames Barrier, where he duly had to face some personal issues as well as aquatic ones. For a start, the Barrier’s manager was his ex-wife, Sam (Jessalyn Gilsig), whose office was full of roses from her new beau. Also present was his estranged father Leonard (Tom Courtenay), here filling the traditional role of The Man Who Knew This Would Happen All Along.

Leonard, you see, was a professor long obsessed with the idea that the Thames Barrier was in the wrong place: an obsession which, in some unspecified way, had caused his wife to die of a broken heart. Now, as the water swept over the Barrier towards central London, all the people (including Rob) who’d written him off as a crank were forced to rethink – and in many cases to utter the phrase “Morrison was right!” in a stunned voice.

Needless to say, the flood itself allowed the computer-generated imagery to go into overdrive, which it did rather well. Shortly afterwards, Rob’s transformation into action hero, and Sam’s into damsel in distress, were both under way, as the two jumped into the raging waters and swam towards the Dome.

Over in Whitehall, meanwhile, Commissioner Nash of Scotland Yard (Joanne Whalley) was masterminding the evacuation of London – and, given that it mostly happened off-screen, making sure we understood the size of the operation. (“No population movement on this scale in this time frame has ever been attempted before,” she explained.) Naturally, she too had personal issues, what with her two teenage daughters being out on the town somewhere…

Impressively, Flood kept this fidelity to the genre (or, if you prefer, these clichés) coming right to the end. Yesterday’s final scene featured Sam raising her arms and bellowing “Rob!” as he disappeared beneath the waves. Which, to be honest, might have been more of a cliff-hanger if the trailer for tonight’s concluding episode hadn’t shown him alive and well – presumably because, from what we saw, he could hold his breath for longer than it takes to evacuate a London hospital.

The new series of Peep Show (C4, Fri) opened soon after where the last one had left off. Having jilted his wife of several minutes, Mark (David Mitchell) was drinking the wedding bubbly and wondering if “anybody’s ever been this unhappy while drinking champagne”.

Still, he did perk up a little when Jez (Robert Webb) arranged a double date – even though it was to the theatre. (“They use proper actors these days: Americans and people off the telly,” Jez reassured him.) Luckily, Mark’s woman was impressed by his Friends of the British Museum magazine. (“This magazine’s sexual dynamite,” he reflected.)

From there, it was Peep Show business as usual, with Mark trying to pass off his fearfulness as moral principle, Jez having no principles at all and almost every line proving quotably great. Admittedly, the plot did get a bit bogged down in the second half. Even so, now that both Have I Got News for You and Peep Show have returned, Friday nights are back the way they should be.